In 1790, the year tax assessor and
friend Daniel Brown visited the home of Joshua
and Nancy Pilcher, they had a household of eight
children - Shadrach, Fielding, Margaret, Moses,
Benjamin, Zachariah, two year-old John, and their
infant son Joshua who had been born on the 15th
of March.
Working from sunup
to sundown plowing and planting his fields of
grain and tobacco, and caring for the cattle and
hogs, Joshua was able to do little more than
provide a meager living for his family. He
began to fall into debt, and believing there was
little future for him or his children who would
likely grow up as illiterate as he and his wife,
Joshua decided to leave Virginia in 1793 for the
new land of Kentucky, and after five hundred
miles of travel, the family reached Lexington.
The town, which
was not yet a major market place, did consist of
about three or four hundred homes clustered
around the courthouse, and had shops belonging to
shoemakers, blacksmiths, hatters, and a local
brewer who supplied the town taverns.
After carefully
searching for land, Joshua chose a few acres in
the summer of 1795 and arranged to share crop a
tract south of town. A year later, records
indicate Joshua had paid taxes on twice as much
livestock as he had owned in Virginia, and by
1804 had paid taxes for a slave.
It was here that
Joshua and Nancy's children grew to adulthood,
left the farm and married. Their son Shadrach
married Sarah Proctor at the age of twenty-nine,
and they continued to live in Fayette County
where they raised a family of four sons: Ezekiel,
Moses, Jeptha Dudley and Shadrach H.; and three
daughters - Sarah who married John Paine, Mary
who married Anderson Foreman, and Margaret who
married Greenbury True.
Joshua’s son
Moses lived in Jessamine county, married
Elizabeth Collins and was the father of at least
Merritt S. and Nancy Pilcher. Son Fielding
became a lieutenant in the Kentucky militia,
moved to Woodford County and was the father of at
least Mason and Lewis Pilcher. Daughter
Margaret married Hiram Shaw who was a merchant
hatter, on Christmas day of 1800 and lived in
Lexington where they raised a family of seven
children - Sarah, Nathaniel, Ann, Ammi, Hiram,
Nancy, and John Pilcher Shaw.
Young Joshua who
had worked in the fields and tended to the stock,
moved to Lexington. He became an apprentice
hatter under his brother-in-law, Hiram Shaw, who
ran a hatter's shop situated on the corner of
Main and Broadway; and within a few years had
learned the hatter's trade.
It’s possible
that during his time as an apprentice hatter,
Joshua had also studied a bit of medicine.
Although no records indicate he had any formal
training, it’s probable by his familiarity
with medicine in his later years with the
Indians, that he may have studied the medical
books in the library, bookstores, or some of the
private collections of a reputable physician who
was practicing in Lexington.
What he had
intended to do with his life prior to 1810, one
cannot say, but in the mid-summer of that year
his father Joshua died at the age of sixty-one,
and left his him a four-year-old brown horse and
his portion of the household goods. With his
widowed mother settled with one of his brothers
or possibly his sister Margaret, young Joshua
decided to strike out on his own and headed to
Nashville - a town only one-third the size of
Lexington.
He arrived in late
spring, and with a limited amount of capital
invested carefully, negotiating with a merchant
named John Lowry - possibly the same or of the
same Lowry family who had been a prominent dealer
in furs and hats in Lexington. He bought
his interest in the Hat Store at Nashville, and
like his father, decided not to rent rather than
own the building - which turned out to be a
fortunate decision because in the winter of
1811-1812 major earthquakes rocked the Ohio and
Mississippi valleys, and many of the buildings
were "thrown down."
While in Nashville
the next three years, Joshua earned a comfortable
living as a merchant-craftsman and chose not to
enlist to fight for the southwestern frontier in
the War of 1812 as did his brother Shadrach, his
nephews, and his cousins. Instead, he
involved himself in the business which on the
evening of March 2nd of 1814, suffered damage
when a fire broke out in Anthony Foster's
home. He was also admitted to membership in
the Masonic Grand Lodge of Tennessee, but in 1814
announced he was closing his shop in Nashville
and calling upon his customers to settle their
accounts.
He set out again,
this time to the Missouri Territory which was new
and largely undeveloped. His destination
was St. Louis, and not long after his arrival,
invested his capital in a business partnership
with N.S. Anderson. Their business, known as
Anderson.& Pilcher, sold dry goods, rented
storage space to other merchants, and may have
dealt in a wide variety of general merchandise,
but the partnership was short-lived when his
partner died in the summer of 1816.
Joshua then became
partner to a fellow-Virginian by the name of
Thomas F. Riddick, who was an influential
merchant, politician, and banker who had lived in
St. Louis ten or twelve years. They opened a
downtown auction house in November of 1816 which
was so conveniently located that the Bank of
Saint Louis rented space there temporarily as did
the Christ Church which was the first Protestant
Episcopal congregation to have organized west of
the Mississippi.
During this time,
Joshua joined the Masons who finally organized a
permanent lodge in Missouri, and was involved in
other enterprises including the lead-processing
industry at Herculaneum and the banking business
of which his partner had been involved, and was
somewhat politically involved.
Riddick had been
one of the original bank commissioners of the
Bank of Saint Louis which had struggled then
failed, and during this time the Bank of Missouri
had opened, and Riddick, Benton and probably
Joshua, allied themselves to the new institution
which was backed by several powerful French
families who needed a bank to support their
investment in the fur trade north and west of St.
Louis.
Joshua now knew
more and more about the fur trade, having learned
the general structure of the fur trade through
his Masonic brothers, and though he had little
knowledge of the Indian country, decided to join
the Missouri Fur Company. He joined in the
summer or early fall of 1819 and may have
purchased his portion of shares from the capital
he borrowed on a business trip to New Orleans and
Havana in the spring of that year.
The investment was
a risk since the fur trade was a gamble, but
Joshua had faith in its founder Manuel
Lisa. Lisa was a Creole French trader who
had organized the company in about 1808 and had
as his partners such men as William Clark, Pierre
Chouteau, Auguste Chouteau and Sylvester
Labbadie. Believing a handsome profit was
attainable if the company could push the Indian
trade closer to the Rockies and the headwaters of
the Missouri as Lisa planned to do, he invested
with Thomas Hempstead, Andrew Woods, Joseph
Perkins (one of Joshua's Masonic brother), Moses
B. Carson (another Mason and brother of Kit
Carson), and John B. Zenoni - and hoped for the
best.
While Manuel Lisa
remained at Fort Lisa at Council Bluff, Joshua
moved from Indian camp to Indian camp trading for
furs during the unusually bitter winter of
1819-1820. As he began learning the trade, Lisa's
health deteriorated and he left for St. Louis in
early April leaving Joshua at Council Bluffs to
observe the details of the fur trade. But
Lisa's health deteriorated and he died the
morning of August 12th with the hope that his
partners would persevere in the fur trade despite
supply problems, losses to the Indians and
larceny in St. Louis. But it would not come
to be - after five years of attempting to make
the company a success, The Missouri Fur Company
became bankrupt and they closed its books
forever.
That fall or
winter, Joshua wrote to friends in Washington
D.C. requesting an appointment as united States
Consul at Chihuahua. On the 5th of March 1825,
President Adams nominated Joshua for the position
and the Senate consented to it two days later.
The immediate confirmation and the timing of the
appointment suggests Joshua might have favored
Adams in the controversial election of 1824, and
although his friend Benton had supported Clay, it
seems he backed Joshua for this consular
post. Hoping to encourage American trade in
the Southwest, Benton also shepherded a bill
through the Senate and into law early in 1825
which appropriated $30,000 for an immediate
survey of the Santa Fe Trail, but due to a long
illness Joshua was unable to leave the country
and fulfill this position.
Using the last of
his capital, Joshua and his former partners
assembled a party of forty-five mounted men in
September of 1827, and led pack horses laden with
goods and equipment west from Council Bluffs
toward the Platte River. They moved up the valley
of the Platte to the forks of the river in
western Nebraska but were on foot by time they
reached the upper Sweetwater west of the north
fork of the Platte because the Crow Indians had
stolen their horses.
With Winter upon
them, they cached whatever merchandise and
property their men were unable to carry, and led
them over the snow-covered Continental Divide,
down into the valley of the Colorado River, and
encamped there for the winter. They traded horses
from the Snake Indians and when the weather
improved in spring, one of the partners
re-crossed the pass and dug up the cache only to
find that seepage had destroyed a considerable
part of the merchandise.
From here they
moved west to Bear Lake for the summer rendezvous
of 1828 and sold their remaining goods to the
trappers. Picking their way slowly over the
mountains, they trapped a few beaver and reached
Clark's Fork in western Montana where they made
winter camp while the snow drifted and waited for
spring.
It wasn't until
Joshua accepted an appointment as a sub-agent,
that he lived in one location for more than a few
months. During this period of time between
spring of 1833 and 1835, Joshua seldom left the
Council Bluffs area and took a wife - possibly
Cabanné's former "servant woman" who
was the half-blood daughter of a french trader
named Michel Barada and an Omaha woman. In early
1834 she gave birth to a son, John Pilcher, and died not long after
of cholera. Joshua showed little concern for the
child and he was taken and raised by Big Elk, an
Omaha chief. The Omaha tribe raised him,
but he kept his family name of Pilcher and grew
up on the Omaha reservation in eastern
Nebraska. He married Harriet Arlington,
fathered ten children, and when he died in
January 1898 near Walthill, Nebraska, had left
dozens of descendants bearing the Pilcher name.
In the spring of
1835, Joshua was appointed sub-agent for a
portion of the Sioux Indians high up on the
Missouri River. Two years later he was nominated
by President Van Buren as Indian Agent to the
Sioux, Cheyenne, and Ponca Indians; and four
years later was nominated for and supported by
President Van Buren, to become Superintendent of
Indian Affairs over thirty-five agents,
sub-agents, interpreters, blacksmiths, farmers,
and others who worked at Fort Leavenworth,
Council Bluffs, the Upper Missouri, and the Osage
River.
The stress of the
position, which was made more difficult by the
additional task of dispersing agent for the
jurisdictions of St. Louis, Iowa, and Wisconsin,
weakened him more as he had never fully improved
from the previous bouts of exposure and
suspecting his death was to follow shortly, he
wrote up his will on the 29th of May requesting
to be buried in Lot No. 10 in St. Luke Square of
the Episcopal Cemetery. - He appointed Edward
Brooks, Druggist of the City of City Louis, as
his sole Exector, and first stated,
"Should I die on my tour to the
South..." His will mentions Susan Brooks,
sister Margaret Shaw of Lexington and her sons
Nathaniel and Hiram; John Haverty of St. Louis,
Mrs. Eliz M. Riddick, wife of the late Colonel
Thomas F. Riddick; daughter of Charles P. Billon;
and John Randolph Benton, the only son of Colonel
Thomas H. Benton.
Joshua was laid to
rest in St. Louis in June of 1843, and almost
fifty years later, a handful of interesting
articles appeared in two St. Louis newspapers
concerning him and a casket that was found. The
first was published in the St. Louis Republic on
December 1st 1892, headline reading: "An Old
Resident's Recollections About a Wealthy Fur
Trade Who Died Fifty Years Ago - The Iron
Coffin May Have Been Pilcher's." This
article was followed up by others and the matter
apparently resolved in the St. Louis Star
published on the 6th of December. This
paper read in part: "Joseph Warren Pilcher,
the man who has been for the past ten days
entertained by newspapers accounts of how his
body had been disinterred after forty years,
walked into the Four Courts yesterday afternoon
and requested the privilege of a statement. Mr.
Pilcher has borne patiently with lengthy
obituaries of himself, but he has felt that he
must draw the line somewhere, and therefore, when
he read the statement that he had been ejected
for rent, he emerged from his retirement and made
a statement.
Mr. Joseph Warren
Pilcher explained in this news article that the
man referred to was his grand-uncle, Joshua
Pilcher, who had been found dead in his bed on
the morning after a banquet at Senator Bentons,
and that his father Ezekiel was a great favorite
with the fur trader. It was, he stated, a great
surprise to his father that he had not been
remembered in the will and employed a Lexington
lawyer to clear up the mystery of the will and
his grand-uncle's sudden death. The will did not
appear to Mr. Pilcher to have been that of a
business man and it was his opinion that Joshua
Pilcher never made the will, but that it was
written by the parties named in it. He had
worked to clear up the mystery that surrounded
Joshua's death, but dropped the whole affair when
the war began.
Although the
casket (which was dug up and created quite a stir
in 1892) turned out not to be that of the fur
trader, Joshua's life was later chronicled in a
book by John E. Sunder, and is mentioned in many
others regarding the fur American fur
trade. He is remembered by his Pilcher
descendants not only as a hatter, merchant, fur
trader, and Indian Agent, but a man of integrity
and good will who once was as his name states - a
maker of furs.
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